Tag: Wayne McGregor

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WAYNE MCGREGOR’S OUTLIER

 

 

Some photos of the new ballet, which premiered last Friday at NYCB, by Paul Kolnik. Top is of Wendy Whelan and Craig Hall, bottom is of cast with Gonzalo Garcia and Sterling Hyltin front and center.

I liked Outlier if mainly because it provided something different for New York audiences, and the dancers seemed to love dancing it, perhaps to be challenged by a different movement vocabulary. Music was to Thomas Ades and was generally sharp and made for an unsettling vibe, which the movement complemented. Cast was all principles: in addition to Hyltin, Garcia, Whelan, and Hall, there were Ashley Bouder, Maria Kowroski, Tiler Peck, Adrian Danchig-Waring, Joaquin De Luz, Robert Fairchild, and Amar Ramasar. Dancers mainly danced in male / female pairs and movement was intentionally awkward, with lots of sharp, angular lines,  jutting, hyper-extended limbs, at times rubbery-looking as a foot would go from pointed to flexed in a split second, and there were lots of kind of sliding motions in the upper body, which is uncharacteristic of ballet – classical anyway. The whole thing felt alien, ominous, something seriously awry.

Maria Kowroski, Wendy Whelan, and Robert Fairchild shone, as I think they have the bodies most suited to this kind of movement. The audience gasped audibly and some laughed in astonishment when, at one point, Maria Kowroski did an arabesque penchee with her lifted leg in attitude and she swung her leg up so fast and with such force (intentionally) that she looked like she was completely jointless. Then she wrapped her bent knee around her partner’s head — I think it was Amar but can’t remember for sure. She looked like a spider. And Robert Fairchild is really becoming one of the greatest male dancers around – at least that I know of. He can do anything and with such precision, not to mention massive amounts of stage presence.

Lighting (by Lucy Carter) was really cool as well, starting out a bright red, with an almost kaleidoscopic image on the back wall,then turning cream-colored and solid, and creating at times rather ominous shadows that highlighted the bizarre movement.

My main problem with the whole was that it didn’t really seem to go anywhere. A story never seemed to take hold and the movement and overall feeling you had remained the same throughout. Maybe I just need to see it again though.

Outlier was shown with two other, completely different ballets – Balanchine’s beautiful Serenade in which Kaitlyn Gilliland really moved me, and his Cortege Hongrois, with Sara Mearns dancing the part of the classical ballerina to splendid perfection with the very capable Jonathan Stafford as her partner, and Sean Suozzi and Rebecca Krohn ever entertaining as the Hungarian folk dancing duo.

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PURO DESEO, PNB AT THE GUGGENHEIM, BALANCHINE LEOTARDS AND ROBBINS & ASTAIRE

 

Photo of Luciana Achugar’s Puro Deseo, from NYTimes, taken by Chad Batka.

You guys, I am really sorry but there are several things I’ve seen lately that I don’t have time to write about. So, I’m linking to other writers’ reviews. The first is Luciana Achugar’s exploration of the occult, Puro Deseo, which premiered recently at the Kitchen. I generally agree with NYTimes’ Gia Kourlas that Achugar needs to go a bit deeper with this piece, but this is a strong start, and parts of the performance I found very compelling, such as when, toward the beginning, Achugar is wearing a large black cape and moving back and forth in a diagonal pattern across the stage, and every time she backs up, toward a light projector, she casts an ominous shadow that eventually eats up the entire theater. Very cool lighting effect that achieved the result she was aiming for. At points her partner, Michael Mahalchick, would contort his body in ways that were both creepy and unsettling but also ultimately human. At times her movement would mirror his, and at times she’d react off of him, sometimes writhing on the ground seemingly in erotic pleasure. This is what I thought needed to be developed a little further – the connection between eroticism and the occult, but regardless, ever since Tere O’Connor’s Nothing Festival a couple of years ago, Achugar has become one of my favorite experimental artists and I always love seeing her new work.

Second, is Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Works & Process event at the Guggenheim over the weekend. I loved seeing James Moore and Carla Korbes again, and especially Seth Orza. Moore’s performance of a beginning excerpt of Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, and Korbes and  Orza dancing an excerpt from Balanchine’s Apollo were, to me the highlights of the evening. But here is Oberon with far more detail on the evening than I can provide right now.

Also, last week I saw two NYCB programs – one comprised of some of Balanchine’s most famous leotard ballets (Symphony in Three Movements is always a favorite of mine, especially in contrast with Concerto Barocco), and an evening of Robbins during which I was blown away, once again, by Gonzalo Garcia as the poetic figure in his Opus 19 / The Dreamer. And, call me a goof (because everyone else seems to hate it), but I always love to see Robbins’ I’m Old Fashioned, with the dancers performing a balletic interpretation of Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth as a movie excerpt of the latter two dancing plays on a screen erected at the back of the stage.  Anyway, here is Macaulay on the Balanchine program and Roslyn Sulcas on the Robbins.

Review coming soon of Wayne McGregor’s new Outlier, although I said some of what I have to say already on Twitter. I’m actually really enjoying tweeting about performances. I find Twitter a useful device for paring down sentences to the essentials. Of particular use to verbose people like me anyway 🙂

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SINCE SEEING WISEMAN’S "LA DANSE" I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO GET LAETITIA PUJOL OUT OF MY MIND

 

(photo taken from here)

Since seeing Frederick Wiseman’s excellent film La Danse a couple days ago — a documentary about the Paris Opera Ballet — I have not been able to get the fascinating etoile (star, highest level of dancer over there), Laetitia Pujol, out of my mind. The film is basically a series of rehearsals with some actual performance footage thrown in, and, unbelievably, it’s absolutely mesmerizing. If anyone’d described it that way to me beforehand — a bunch of rehearsal footage — I would’ve thought I’d be bored out of my mind, but it’s so incredibly interesting watching these dancers rehearse with top choreographers like Wayne McGregor and Angelin Preljocaj and Mats Ek. And the performances — omg – -that company does everything from the aforementioned contemporary choreographers, to Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater, to Petipa to Balanchine. Parisians are so damn lucky! We get either Petipa or Balanchine over here… not at all fair…

Anyway, Pujol blew me completely away. I’d never seen her dance before and somewhere in the middle of the film she’s rehearsing and she does the most mind-blowing series of turns all over the damn room. I’ve spent the past couple hours searching YouTube and, yay, finally found what she was doing! It’s Etudes, here:

For some reason, the spins looked a slight bit faster in the film, but you get the idea.
Here are a couple of others of Pujol:
The first, Le Baiser, which I love,

And Giselle, with Nicolas Le Riche:

One odd thing about the movie is that it’s a documentary, but there are no captions, so you have to try to guess who all the choreographers and dancers are. There are credits at the end, but you can’t possibly figure out who is who at that point, when there are all these names filling up the screen. At first I thought this was kind of a discredit to the artists not to list their names and titles or bios when they are shown in the film, but then I thought, well, it would kind of interrupt the flow of the action; this made it seem more like a narrative film, like one of those narrative films that’s shot with a handheld camera or the like to make you think you’re eavesdropping on someone’s actual life — which, it turns out, you are! Interesting filming device…

The real-life rehearsals do have their moments of (probably unintentional) humor, such as when one of the choreographers is describing to a young dancer learning the role of Medea that she’s portraying a god, a person whose intense, other-worldly powers make loving fraught with danger, and she says “Oh, like Edward Scissorhands.” At times, though, people laughed at seemingly odd things, like when a young dancer new to the company tells the director she longs to dance like Pujol and the director tells her, “Well, she has her own personal intelligence.” People in the audience seemed to think that was funny, but clearly, Pujol does have “her own personal intelligence”; dancing isn’t just about excellence of technique, it’s about using your brain. And these dancers are so fascinating because they’re so clever, they’re such powerful performers.

Go see this movie if you at all can. In NY, it’s at Film Forum.